Remembering Mary Lou Hague
By Kim Weaver Spurr

ary Lou Hague (BSBA '96), 26, was a successful research analyst who worked for Keefe, Bruyette & Woods Inc. on the 89th floor of the second World Trade Center tower.

She was dedicated to her work. And when employees were advised to stay after the plane hit the first tower during the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, she stayed. Her mother, Liza Adams, last spoke to her daughter by phone after the plane crashed into tower one.

Mary Lou Hague met Michael Jordan in the summer of 1994 while working at The Governor's Club in Chapel Hill.

A native of Parkersburg, W.Va., Hague had the energy and personality to match the city of New York. She lived life large, and she loved life. She was crazy about cherry Twizzlers candy and frozen yogurt, Michael Jordan and Michael Jackson, traveling to international destinations and spending time with friends. The weekend before the terrorist attacks, she had sat up front at a Michael Jackson concert in Madison Square Garden.

And she loved Carolina, Adams said, where she was an active community volunteer, a member of the Golden Key National Honor Society, and vice president of finance and treasurer for Tri-Delta sorority.

Her college diploma hung on the bedroom wall of her tastefully decorated apartment, added her friend and sorority sister, Elizabeth McWilliams Kimzey, a third-grade teacher who lives in Hague's Upper East Side neighborhood.

She was a Southern woman with financial prowess, a person who devoured Southern Living magazine but made her mark in the business world at an early age, Kimzey said.

"She was very smart and she knew her field so well," Kimzey said.

The opening bell of the New York Stock Exchange was dedicated to Hague on Dec. 5. The CEO for the Western Bank of Puerto Rico, one of Mary Lou's clients, talked about how her research, mentioned in American Banker magazine, had been beneficial for the company.

It was a fitting tribute, Adams said, as Hague loved to witness the opening bell of the stock exchange as much as she loved the slam dunks of Michael Jordan and biking through the tulips in Amsterdam.

Hague's story has captured the hearts of media outlets around the world. She's been featured in The New York Times, Newsday, Rolling Stone and The London Times. The outpouring of love from people has been wonderful, said Adams, who wears a signet ring sent to her by a Minneapolis jeweler. Hague's initials are carved on one side, and on the other, the inscription: "We are separated only physically."

All of this gives her comfort, Adams said, in a time of terrible sadness.

"I've received notes from people all over the country about how she touched their lives," Adams said. "She always found the positive side in everything."

Perhaps Elizabeth Kimzey's words are the most fitting tribute. In a memorial speech she made before the Junior League, the friend Hague liked to call "Lizzie" wrote these words: "I will honor her memory by looking for every opportunity in my own life to live more passionately, to smile more brightly, to go after my own goals more determinedly and to take risks as big as I can.

"Because that's what Mary Lou would have done."

An endowed, need-based scholarship to UNC in Hague's memory was established anonymously by a friend. Contributions, marked for the Mary Lou Hague Scholarship, can be sent to the UNC Development Office, Attn: Arthur Gregg, P.O. Box 309, Chapel Hill, NC 27514.